Holovibes

Holovibes is a free software dedicated to the calculation of holograms in real-time. Input interferogram data can be grabbed from a digital camera or loaded from files recorded beforehand. Massive amounts of data can be handled robustly at high throughput, saved to disk, and visualized in real-time without any risk of frame dropping thanks to the use of several configurable input and output memory buffers.

The recent version requires images of a lateral position. It is important that the position is precise since deviation may confound with feature annotations. Images from any source can be used. However, depending on the image properties parameters may have to be adjusted. Furthermore, images obtained with normal microscope and not using an automated position system with embryos in glass capillaries require conversion using a KNIME workflow (the workflow is available as well). As a result of the analysis the software provides JSON files that contain the coordinates of the features. Coordinates are provided for eye, fish contour, notochord , otoliths, yolk sac, pericard and swimbladder. Furthermore, pigment cells in the notochord area are detected. Additional features can be manually annotated. It is the aim of the software to provide the coordinates, which may then be analysed subsequently to identify and quantify changes in the morphology of zebrafish embryos.

2D brain slice region annotation: SliceMap

Whole brain tissue slices are commonly used in neurobiological research for analyzing pathological features in an anatomically defined manner. However, since many pathologies are expressed in specific regions of the brain, it is necessary to have an annotation of the regions in the brain slices. Such an annotation can be done by manual delineation, as done most often, or by an automated region annotation tool.

SliceMap is a FIJI/ImageJ plugin for automated brain region annotation of fluorescent brain slices. The plugin uses a reference library of pre-annotated brain slices (the brain region templates) to annotate brain regions of unknown samples. To perform the region annotation, SliceMap registers the reference slices to the sample slice (using elastic registration plugin BUnwarpJ) and uses the resulting image transformations to morph the template regions towards the anatomical brain regions of the sample. The resulting brain regions are saved as FIJI/ImageJ ROI’s (Regions Of Interest) as a single zip-file for each sample slice.

More information can also be found in "SliceMap: an algorithm for automated brain region annotation", Michaël Barbier, Astrid Bottelbergs, Rony Nuydens, Andreas Ebneth, Winnok H De Vos, Bioinformatics, btx658, https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btx658